1579 - Drake explores California dn Oregon coasts

While Sir Francis Drake was away on his
voyages of exploration, no Elizabethan swashbuckler was more
devoted to throwing off the Spanish imperial yoke in the New World
than Sir Walter Raleigh.

Raleigh distinguished himself by participating in
wars against the Irish, and became a celebrity for his
exploits. Queen Elizabeth I considered him too important to
her causes at home to allow him to participate in any of the
voyages to the New World that he sponsored and financed, but
this did not prevent him from growing into the most fierce
imperialist of his day. (Click here for more)

As Robert Williams has noted: "The
ingenious innovation of Elizabethan conquistadores and the
proto-capitalist promoters of commerce in the Americas was the
forging of a discourse of conquest that spoke with intense and
legitimating passion to their own countrymen's emerging sense of
material and spiritual manifest destiny."

The Elizabethan could passionately
pursue either side of the colonizing equation: either religious
reformation and/or imperial revenue. The English discourse of
the Discovery Era would prove that by doggedly pursuing one goal in
the New World, the English crusaders could secure many other prizes
at home.